The HR Binge: Goodfellas

The Study Material: Goodfellas

Time Commitment: 2 hours, 26 minutes

Your Trainers: If you could call them that...are the mobsters in this movie.

My husband is a movie guy. He feels through movies. You know how you put on a really sad song just to wallow in the angst and have a good cry? He does that with The Social Network, The Shawshank Redemption, Zodiac, The Royal Tenenbaums, etc. If I come home to Inside Llewellyn Davis, I know it’s probably a moody day.

He also works things out in his head with them, so, I wasn’t terribly surprised when, after a mini-Martin Scorsese marathon during a tough week (as he does), he told me that Goodfellas is basically a case study on how bad mentoring can tank a company.

“Are you telling me to write LinkedIn content on ‘what Goodfellas taught me about mentoring’?  Because I usually deal in Taylor Swift or Dolly Parton analogies and this is the mafia…”

“100%. Because I’d read that and it’s strange in business writing. And you are always using pop culture, so why not?”

My husband and I having this exact conversation. (RIP, Ray Liotta. I loved you in Muppets In Space.)

T-Swift to hijacking planes? Why not, indeed. Grab your notepad and some popcorn, here comes The HR Binge: Goodfellas!

Huge editor’s note: This movie is a classic but it’s also violent and not your real HR role model. I’m not saying you should run your company like the mafia, but I am saying that if the mafia, like…ONBOARDS better than you, what are you doing over there?

The Dream Job

One of the most quoted films of all time, Goodfellas starts with the line, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." And with that, we’ve been sucked into “dream job” territory.

"The Dream Jobs" start out well enough. Like Henry, something probably sparked at a young age and you’ve been hooked ever since. Most likely, something interests you about the work, but even more likely is that you want to see yourself in the work, like Henry sees Paulie and the other family members. You want to feel a certain way about yourself, garner respect for your craft, have access to the things they have access to, and maybe get into some philanthropy.

If you are chasing a dream job, mentoring is a large part of why you stay through the grunt work. It helps you feel visible and gives you the feeling that you can make it. From the get-go, Henry feels like he belongs, and he commits 100%. On the flip side, employers can sometimes take advantage of those with big dreams by pushing more work without fostering growth. They can keep employees in the dark on how to navigate a career path. Which is how we get to…

The Mob Is Weirdly Transparent for a Secretive Organization

If you’ve ever looked around and wondered who in this office is your boss, or attempted to understand how to escalate an issue, it might be crazy to find out that the mob makes a better org chart than you.

“Now the guy's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy...he can call Paulie.”

Imagine seeing this on the earnings call.

In Goodfellas, there’s no secret about who is at the top, who deals with who, and we even know the org chart for rival mobs. That’s how transparent it is. Literally everyone on the street knows who to deal with and who answers to the big guy. Whyyyyyyy is this still a problem at your 8-5?

Mentoring isn’t just coffee meetings once a month, and it isn’t just the work in front of your employee. It’s about teaching your employees how the business runs, who’s in charge, what tasks they need to prioritize, and it starts to help them see what role might be next for them.

At one of my former jobs, it took almost 4 months for me to find out the person I’d been referring to as my boss was actually a slightly senior teammate. Not one person took the time to explain any of the team dynamics or roles, which is a case for…

Assembling an Informed Crew

Henry’s first day: clear expectations, immediate hands-on training, instant belonging. Sure, it’s not brain surgery or a highly specialized field. He’s a criminal (I repeat the obvious: do not become a criminal) doing stupid things. However, they hit the important parts of his training/onboarding on Day One, and it’s essential that Henry is put with a mentor because every day will be different. New fights arise, old alliances will break down, and they know that their work requires a level of detail and care that can only be taught on the job.

To see mentoring as a one day or one week program is to set up failure in the long term. And not only do we see this at the beginning, we see how important this is for every job/project. The Lufthansa Heist plot is a case study in Project Management failure: Perfect planning, flawless execution, relying on intense communication networks, and success! Then, complete organizational breakdown in the aftermath. When mentoring is a nice-to-have, the need-to-haves will suffer, too.

Steal It

I usually put a “steal this idea” in these blogs, and frankly, this one was terrifying to consider. So let’s keep it pretty tame and go with the prison dinner scene.

The team that eats together, stays together...and hopefully out of jail.

Teams that eat together are more likely to succeed on just about every metric, especially when it’s frequent. Research found that firefighters that prepare meals together have better performance and safety records than firehouses that don’t. The key is to make it a more regular occurrence, where both personal and professional conversations become a strong source of information and support.

The Binge Lesson

Mentoring is structure, clarity, guidance, and the key to retaining people who want to do their best work. We hear it all the time: Do I need to tell people how to do their job? Micromanaging, no. Setting expectations? Yes.

Yes, lest they bring bad habits from their last employer into your work.

Yes, lest they operate on rumor or inaccurate information.

Yes, lest they think that erratic guy over there is the one to emulate.

That is exactly what you should be doing. When you find yourself thinking, "we're too busy for that right now," remember the pace of this movie. Everything is fine...until it isn’t.